Hi, I've been running XAMPP fine for a couple of years on an English version of Windows and have just installed it on a PC running a Japanese version of Windows Professional 32 bit. Apache works fine if I install it to any directory with a latin path but if I move it to any directory with a Japanese UTF-8 path it fails to run. Is there a solution to this? I'm running XAMPP 1.8.1. I did not install Tomcat, Mercury or Filezilla, I assume that's okay.

I tried looking at the event viewer but I couldn't find anything relating to XAMPP. I wasn't sure where exactly I should be looking to be honest. The .bat files relating to starting Apache and MySQL within the root directory of XAMPP are both in ANSI format, at least that's what Notepad++ is telling me. Is that what you're referring to? MySQL starts, its only Apache that won't run if that's any help.

httpd.exe: Syntax error on line 35 of C:/Users/\xe3\x82\xa8\xe3\x83\x89\xe3\x82\xa6\xe3\x82\xa3\xe3\x83\xb3\xe3\x83\xbb\xe3\x83\x96\xe3\x83\xa9\xe3\x83\x83\xe3\x83\x89\xe3\x83\x95\xe3\x82\xa9\xe3\x83\xbc\xe3\x83\x89/\xef\xbc\x92\xef\xbc\x93\xef\xbc\x90GB/\xe3\x82\xb5\xe3\x83\xbc\xe3\x83\x90/xampp/apache/conf/httpd.conf: ServerRoot must be a valid directory

Error: Apache shutdown unexpectedly.14:30:31 [Apache] This may be due to a blocked port, missing dependencies, 14:30:31 [Apache] improper privileges, a crash, or a shutdown by another method.14:30:31 [Apache] Check the "/xampp/apache/logs/error.log" file14:30:31 [Apache] and the Windows Event Viewer for more clues

And yes I meant the whole XAMPP directory and not any one part of it. After moving it I run setup_xampp.bat as instructed. It just looks like something is incompatible with Unicode somewhere?

Solved. The conf files in xampp\apache\conf were in ANSI format. I changed httpd.conf to UTF8 first then got a series of warning messages and converted each referred conf file to UTF8 within Notepad++. Eventually it stopped complaining. I used UTF8 without a BOM. So I take it that XAMPP in its current form is not Unicode compatible then? Is that a bug or by design?

Do those same .conf files work if you use them in a ISO folder path? (sans the japanese characters) They should - as ASCII and ANSI character sets are subsets of UTF-8.

So I take it that XAMPP in its current form is not Unicode compatible then? Is that a bug or by design?

There is a third possibility you know - omission - no one expected an English distribution to be used on a non-latinate filesystem when they were writing the configuration files

What is UTF-8, exactly? OK, you don't have to know this to get CityDesk to work, but you may be wondering, so we'll try to explain it here.

In the olden days computers used 8 bits to store a letter. There are 256 possible combinations of 8 bits. That's enough for many languages, but not enough for Asian languages like Chinese which have thousands of different "letters." There were many different incompatible encoding schemes for jamming different alphabets into the same 256 combinations. The most common format, ASCII, defined what would happen in the first 127 combinations, but it was only good enough for English.

To simplify the problem a consortium of computer makers came up with an international standard called Unicode. Under Unicode, you would use 16 bits to store a letter. That gives you room for 65,536 different letters, which is enough for just about every known alphabet all at once, making multilingual text on computers possible.

The trouble is that all the people who spoke English were distracted that they would have to "waste" an extra 8 bits on each letter even when they were just writing in English. And besides, there were already a lot of existing computer systems that assumed 8 bits = 1 letter. So the Unicode Consortium came up with a scheme called UTF-8. In this scheme, all English language letters (and indeed, all characters below 128 from the old fashioned ASCII character set) would be written out exactly the same way as before. Only non-English letters would be encoded using between 2 and 6 bytes. This scheme is the most popular method of encoding Unicode on the Internet.

The details, of course, are somewhat more complicated than this, and in fact, this is a rather grotesque oversimplification, but we've probably already bored you to tears so we'll move on now.

MySQL and Apache both launch and run correctly, however since posting the last post I found that I couldn't access either the XAMPP index page nor my site via localhost. I'm sorry, I don't have the bug to hand as I moved XAMPP to a latin only directory structure at that point.

If I understand your second question then the answer is the same .conf files work if the folder path has only ANSI characters but stop working when the folder path contains Japanese characters. Interestingly, if I move the XAMPP install folder and run the XAMPP setup .bat file again it overwrites the .conf files in ANSI format and Apache won't run again.

Thanks for posting that info for me, the only distribution I've seen is the one at apachefriends.org, so when you say English Distribution I think I'm right in saying its the only distribution? Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not sure how Japanese developers are installing XAMPP but my guess is they install it to the default root directory of their C drive in which case there are no problems. If they try to install it elsewhere they will probably hit the same problems as me.

Anyway, thanks for helping out. Maybe this thread will be of some help to other people.

I'm not sure how Japanese developers are installing XAMPP but my guess is they install it to the default root directory of their C drive in which case there are no problems.

I'd agree with that assessment - we always suggest installing XAMPP in the root of a drive.

'English distribution' was a poor choice of words. I should have said German and English (Latinate) I have done some research, there was a Japanese XAMPP at some point. All the 'work' nowadays is done in German and English. The XAMPP installer still includes some .jp files, but I don't think there's a complete locale setup for anything other than German or English.

BTW - I'm a specialist in multi-lingual development (part of the reason I am so interested). I can empathize with how complex all this appears (because it is). For one team I am on, our next huge task is moving a whole ten-year old Internet project off ISO to UTF-8, its daunting. Separately, I personally develop and maintain a portal and database system in four languages (using a framework). Fortunately for me, they are all European tongues which simplifies things a bit.

Thanks Jon. There's some great information there. I can generally read Japanese sites but its painfully slow for me. I'll take a look at WAMP and see what the status is. It looks like I got Apache and MySQL working by changing the format of the files to UTF8 but I decided to give up when I hit what I think was a PHP problem although I don't have the error any more.

I also did a quick bit of research, I checked through a couple of Japanese sites with guides for XAMPP installation but they were both installing to the default directory in which case as I mentioned they would not encounter a problem. For the time being its probably too time consuming for me to be worth the results but I'll bookmark the thread and come back to it if I get more time.